Unholy Alliance (13 page)

As the cutter pulled up in front of the main
entrance to the manor-house, Marc noticed a two-seater parked near
the rear of the building. Abel Struthers was there tending to Angus
Withers’ matched pair of Clydesdales. Marc also noticed that the
runner-tracks made by his own vehicle last evening were still
visible beneath the fresh snow, as were the footprints left by him
and Jasper Hogg. Since Dr. Withers and Cobb had entered through the
rear door of the manor, it was clear to Marc that no-one had tried
to enter the house through the front door after he himself had left
here at nine o’clock.

Constable Horatio Cobb was waiting for Marc
in the foyer. He was in uniform, except for his helmet. Dora’s
breakfast could be seen in various spatters across his lapels and
over his tie. “Thank the Lord you’re here, Major,” he said. “I was
sure I was gonna be left on my own in this here madhouse.”

“Where’s Chief Sturges?” Marc asked.

“His gout’s near killin’ him. We had to carry
him inta the office. Then when the young lad come in about
seven-thirty cryin’ murder, Sarge sent me out here to do the
honours.”

“Well, you
are
an experienced
investigator.”

“But I’m in a house full of French gents, and
I don’t parlay a word of that garble. So I sent the lad back to ask
the Chief to fetch you, seein’ as Dora told me yer Beth was all
right.”

“Well, we’re both here now – officially, it
seems. So you’d better tell me what you’ve found so far.”

Marc tossed his coat and hat on a nearby
hall-tree, and looked past Cobb. “Where is Angus? And the
victim?”

“Angus is over there in the library talkin’
to Macaulay. He’s finished his examination.”

“And the body?”

“In here,” Cobb said, indicating the small
butler’s office just inside the foyer. The door was ajar. Marc
peered in. Graves Chilton was seated at his desk, his head
seemingly asleep upon his forearms, as if he had been working late
at his accounts and drifted off from fatigue. Except that this
Graves Chilton was unnaturally still, and no breath escaped his
parted lips. Only his luxuriant, tangerine hair looked –
grotesquely – alive.

Marc took one cautious step inside. The room
was still warmed by the wall that abutted the parlour’s hearth.
Partially hidden by the butler’s forearms and chin was what
appeared to be a ledger, opened about halfway. Just beyond it lay a
glass tray with quills, an inkstand, and blotting-sand. The ink
container was stoppered and the quills in their proper place.
Closer to the ledger, however, was a thick pencil. If Chilton had
been writing in the ledger, he had been using pencil, not ink.
Which was unusual. At the victim’s right hand sat a dusty bottle of
what had to be vintage wine of some sort. It had been
well-fingered, and four-fifths consumed. Near it Marc noticed a
silver flask, lying on its side – unstoppered. There were two small
wine goblets on the desk, one at the victim’s left hand and the
other across the desk, where a second chair had been drawn up.
Chilton had been sharing a drink of his wine with someone seated
across from him. His murderer?

“How do we know this was murder?” Marc said
to Cobb, who had come up beside him.

“Poisoned,” Cobb said with distaste. “The doc
says that there bottle of fancy Spanish sherry was drippin’ with
loud-an’-numb.
”

“Enough to kill him?”

“That’s right, Marc,” Angus Withers said,
coming up behind the two investigators. “From what’s left in the
bottle, I’m estimating there was four or five ounces in all, enough
laudanum to stagger a horse. I’ll know for sure when I get it back
to the surgery. And the corpse shows every sign of having been
poisoned.”

“But surely Chilton would have noticed
something odd about the sherry?”

“Normally, yes, though it’s not always that
easy to detect laudanum in small doses. Of course, you’d have to be
sober in any case.”

“You think he was too drunk to spot it?”

“That flask there is pretty much empty, but
it definitely contained Scotch whiskey. I’m not the policeman here,
but it’s likely the poor devil was nipping at the whiskey while he
was working at his accounts and – ”

“And somebody decided to join him, bearing a
gift,” Marc said.

“A very expensive bottle of Amontillado. And,
as it turns out, a deadly one.”

“Were there traces of laudanum in the second
glass, the one across from him?”

“I can’t be sure until I get it back to the
surgery, but it was definitely used to drink sherry from.”

“So you’re speculating that someone saw a
light in here last night, invited himself in, figured the victim
was already inebriated, and offered to share a glass of Amontillado
– leaving the bottle, laced with laudanum, to finish the butler
off?”

“Something like that,” Withers said. “I’ll
leave those details to you and Cobb. Right now I’m concerned with
getting the body into my sleigh before rigor starts to set in, and
then back to my surgery, not that I think I’ll find anything I
haven’t deduced here.”

“Rigor hasn’t started?” Marc said, puzzled.
“What time do you estimate death, then?”

“Not long ago. Just before sunrise, I’d say.
It takes laudanum five or six hours to actually kill its victim.
Add another two or three hours for rigor to begin, and my best
guess is that he consumed the fatal amount some time shortly after
midnight.”

“I shouldn’t think he’d be working in here
much beyond that hour. He’d had a very full day, like the rest of
us.”

“I agree,” Garnet Macaulay said as he came up
beside Withers. He looked bewildered, as if he’d woken to find
himself in a place that had once been familiar but was now
completely strange. “And except for this office, the main part of
the house was dark and deserted by ten o’clock, when my guests and
I left the parlour and billiard-room and went to bed. The two wings
at the rear of the house are where everyone sleeps – servants, too.
Chilton would be alone in this cubby-hole. No-one would know he was
here. I just can’t understand – ”

“What if this door was open?” Cobb said. “The
candle would shine into the hall here, an’ you might see it from
that round hall at the other end.”

“Either that or the poisoner
knew
Chilton would be working here,” Marc said. “Garnet, I’ll need to
know everything about Chilton you can tell me, but first I want to
have a closer look in here.”

“Go right ahead, Marc. I wasn’t finished my
chat with Mr. Macaulay anyway,” Withers said, drawing Macaulay
discreetly back towards the library directly across the hall from
the butler’s office.

Marc and Cobb went right up to the desk.

“You interested in the big book here?” Cobb
said.

Marc nodded, then carefully pulled the ledger
from under Chilton’s stiffening arms. “Bring that candle closer,”
Marc said, indicating one already alight on the shelf just above
the desk.

“These other two are burned right down,” Cobb
said. “I figure he fell asleep fer good with both of these still
blazin’. I lit this one fer the doc when we come in earlier.”

Marc was leafing through the pages of the
ledger. “This is a standard accounts book. There are entries going
back months, made by Alfred Harkness, the former butler. These last
few pages show a different hand, Chilton’s, no doubt, since his
arrival just over a week ago. All of them are in ink.”

Cobb was fiddling with the quills. “These’re
fresh-cut an’ clean. I’d say they ain’t been used fer a while.”

“Now, this is interesting,” Marc said as he
ran his fingers along the inside edge of the opened book. “Three
pages, the top three, have been torn out of here – rather neatly,
but unmistakeably removed. It’s possible that Chilton had been
writing something on these sheets with that pencil.”

“An’ now they’re missin’.”

“Indeed. We’ve got to consider the
possibility that Chilton was killed for something he had written on
those missing pages, something the killer did not want anyone to
know about.”

“So he ripped ‘em out an’ took them with
him?”

“If he did – and that seems a reasonable
conclusion – then he must have waited until Chilton was too drunk
or dazed to notice. Or care.”

“Takin’ an awful chance, wouldn’t you say,
sittin’ in here feedin’ a bottle of poison to Macaulay’s butler
until the poor bugger was too pissed to blink?”

“True, except that with this door closed the
entire south section of Elmgrove would be in utter darkness. Even
voices would not carry down the hall to the rotunda, and certainly
not into the sleeping quarters beyond it. If one were planning a
stealthy poisoning, this would be the ideal spot to carry it
out.”

“Likewise, anybody sleepin’ back there could
sneak out an’ cross the round room an’ paddle down here without
bein’ heard or seen.”

“Yes, and I’m certain he or she did. There
are no fresh footprints outside the front door, and the French
doors in the parlour are permanently locked during the winter
months, I was told yesterday.”

“There’s a back door,” Cobb said. “We come in
that way. Brought us inta the round hall near the pink stairway.
An’ there’s a rear door to the servants’ wing.”

“True, but don’t bother checking for
bootprints back there. The servants will have been up and about at
the rear of the place since daybreak.”

“It’d been pretty much tramped about when we
got here after eight.”

“Still, I’d like you and Struthers to walk
the periphery of the grounds later, and look for signs of external
entry overnight. It’s not likely, but we must be thorough. By the
way, who discovered the body?”

“Prissy Finch, the maid. She usually checks
with the butler before her tidyin’ duties on this floor. Chilton
wasn’t in his room when she knocked, an’ when he didn’t show up fer
breakfast, she figured he was workin’ here an’ lost track of the
time. The door was wide open, she says, so she seen the corpse
right off. She says she didn’t touch anythin’, just screamed fer
Mr. Macaulay. All this was about seven o’clock. She got the squire
outta bed an’ give him the bad news. An’ he sent young Struthers
skedadellin’ inta town fer the police. I guess he reckoned it was a
suicide an’ the law oughta be brought along just in case. Turns out
he was almost right.”

“You’ve talked with Priscilla?”

“Yup. Her an’ Macaulay. I figured I’d wait
until I got the details from Doc Withers before takin’ things any
farther. When he suggested murder, I sent fer you.”

“It is not inconceivable that this was a
suicide,” Marc said slowly.

“Except there’s no sign of a bottle of
laudanum anywhere in here,” Cobb pointed out. “The desk drawer’s
empty, an’ you can see fer yerself that there’s nothin’ much on
that shelf. I asked Macaulay to have a gander in the butler’s rooms
up the hall there. He come back an’ said he didn’t see no medicine
bottle.”

“You and I will have to do a thorough search
ourselves. Either Chilton or his visitor doctored the sherry, and
that amount of laudanum had to come from a pretty conspicuous vial
or bottle. And from what I’ve observed myself, Cobb, Chilton seemed
to be settling into his job in a normal way. He did not appear
depressed. In fact, I’m pretty sure he was initiating an affair
with Priscilla Finch. None of this suggests a man ready to kill
himself. It’s no wonder that Garnet suspected foul play immediately
and sent for the police.”

“An’ you’d think if the butler was about to
do himself in, he wouldn’t’ve poured his visitor a glass of the
polluted potion first.”

“True. And why leave two candles blazing
through an open door, which might attract unwanted attention?”

“An’ that’s pretty fancy wine fer a butler
who’s just started his job an’ ain’t had a penny in wages yet.”

“We’ll need to trace the source of the
sherry. It may be that Chilton stole it from the cellars here. He
would have keys. Also, we’ll need to find out who had a supply of
laudanum in this house.”

Cobb sighed. “We already got a pretty good
idea on that. As soon as the doc sniffed out laudanum, Macaulay
turned white as the snow out there an’ raced off to his big
bathroom. When he come back, he was even whiter. He told us his
wife’s medicine, almost a full bottle of
loud-an’-numb
, was
missin’ off the shelf.”

It was Marc’s turn to pale. “Oh, dear. That’s
too much of a coincidence. And everyone in the house knew it was
there – including our illustrious guests.”

“The four gents from Quebec, ya mean?”

“And Hincks and Baldwin also. Where are these
people now?”

“I put our people in the parlour behind us
an’ the French gents in the dining-room. Prissy went back to the
servants quarters, but I told her only to tell the others there
that Chilton was dead an’ the police was investigatin’.”

“Well, so far, we’ve got the means and lots
of opportunity for someone in this house to have killed Graves
Chilton, but what on earth would the motive be? I don’t relish
questioning anyone here without some idea of why Chilton would be a
target for murder.”

“An’ he has to be the target, eh? It’s his
office an’ the killer sat across from him.”

“Yes. And I’m now wondering what could have
been written in pencil on those three missing pages that would give
rise to homicide?”

“It has to’ve been one of the servants, I
figure. Macaulay tells me this Chilton just come from England last
week to take over bein’ their boss. Old Alfred’s been dead over two
months, so it’s possible one of the regulars had some kind of
fiddle goin’ on an’ the new broom was onto it.”

“Good point. I overheard Chilton telling
Macaulay that he wanted to leave his post for half an hour
yesterday afternoon to check on some discrepancy or other in
supplies for the horses. He gave every indication of being a real
stickler for detail and correct behaviour. Also, on Wednesday I
heard him dressing down Austin Bragg rather publicly – embarrassing
him needlessly, I thought.”